| Summary: | "Passed by the House of Representatives at the start of the 1836 session, the gag rule rejected all petitions against slavery, effectively forbidding Congress from addressing the antislavery issue until it was rescinded in late 1844. In the Senate, a similar rule lasted until 1850. Strongly supported by all southern and some northern Democratic congressmen, the gag rule became a proxy defense of slavery's morality and economic value in the face of growing pro-abolition sentiment. In John Quincy Adams and the Gag Rule, 1835-1850, Peter Charles Hoffer transports readers to Washington, DC, in the period before the Civil War to contextualize the heated debates surrounding the rule. At first, Hoffer explains, only a few members of Congress objected to the rule. These antislavery representatives argued strongly for the reception and reading of incoming abolitionist petitions. When they encountered an almost uniformly hostile audience, however, John Quincy Adams took a different tack. He saw the effort to gag the petitioners as a violation of their constitutional rights. Adams's campaign to lift the gag rule, joined each year by more and more northern members of Congress, revealed how the slavery issue promoted a virulent sectionalism and ultimately played a part in southern secession and the Civil War. A lively narrative intended for history classrooms and anyone interested in abolitionism, slavery, Congress, and the coming of the Civil War, John Quincy Adams and the Gag Rule, 1835-1850, vividly portrays the importance of the political machinations and debates that colored the age"--
"The newest entry in the Witness to History series introduces students to the gag-rule (1836), which tabled any petitions or discussions of slavery, effectively forbidding Congress to address the issue. It took John Quincy Adams four Congresses and a lot of passionate arguing to finally get enough votes to repeal the gag-rule in 1844. Students often think of the first half of the 19th century as a boring gap between the Revolution and the Civil War. Peter Hoffer's new book vividly shows the relevance of the political machinations and debates that colored the age. The subject of the present book, the gag-rule debates in Congress, returns us to Washington D.C. in the period before the Civil War. Then, the capital was still a southern city, with slaves on the streets and slave auctions in public places. A member of Congress could not make his way from his boarding house or hotel to the Capitol without seeing reminders that half the nation was slave country. The issues in the congressional debates over the reception of anti-slavery petitions in the Antebellum Era may seem transparent, but the language the participants used had deeper connotations than a casual reading reveals. The purpose of this volume is to place those debates in the context of a nation divided by the slavery issue"--
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